About this blog

It’s a Blob

Introduction

This was a project made while studying at the institution SAE. In this project, we had to design and game and make it in 12 weeks. Due to the class being small there was only 1 group made up of 5 inexperienced game developers to make this game. Ultimately throughout this project, we as a group focused more on learning the skills to make a game rather than trying to make the best game possible.

What Went Right?

Design

The design period was our best period because everyone was excited and had ideas on what we should do. We would have multiple sessions just bouncing off one another to try to decide what the game is and how it would work. We ultimately knew that we wanted something different and quirky that would stand out. This is why an alien blob was chosen as the main character and that it would eat food which would change its look and state. We knew the vision of what we wanted our game to be from the early design period and we followed through we that it the completion, changing a few things but always going back to the original vision which helped us a lot in the long run.

Meeting the Quota

When starting this project, we had 4 assignments throughout the trimester that helped us to know where we should be at what given point. Throughout the trimester we would make sure that we were ready to hand in each assignment before the due date making it easier for us on the day and making it easier for us to know if we are falling behind or not. Not only that it helps us keep crack on what needs to be done at that given time, because we are still new to game development without the assignments, we would know where to start or what comes next, we would just be guessing otherwise. I’m happy to say that we handed all the assignments in on time and it wasn’t a rush to get to the finish line.

Learning Different Skills

Being new to game design and all the aspects in it, learning and developing skills was 100% necessary if we wanted to complete the project. Game design was very new to me and most of the group and no one has touched the program Unity and coded a proper game in C# before, but throughout the project we pushed ourselves to learn these skills. Each week we would try something new learning and add it to our game, this was done for the main reason to learn. Due to the fact we were at university, our main focus wasn’t on trying to make the best possible game but to learn all we can before the course finishes and that is what we did.

Testing

When going into the testing period we didn’t know what to expect because we haven’t experienced it before. We knew that our game had bugs in it and there were a few small things that needed to be changed, but after going through playtesting we understood/opened our eyes to show that a lot of work still needed to go into the game. This stage was incredibly useful and productive to us to learn the mistakes that we have made and how to fix them.

What Went Wrong?

Teamwork

Throughout the assignment period, there have been complications when working as a team. If we look at the beginning, everyone was focused on the game and wanted to be involved. We would have meetings on discord, talk about it in class or whenever we could, this is why I believe our best period was the design stage. After we completed the design and got onto making the game, slowly some group member became less involved and less active about the project. It came to the point where I would say close to 70% of the work was done by two people in the group of five. This ultimately affected the finished product due to the fact that we didn’t get everything completed in the game we wanted to.

Time Restraint

This problem links in with the first. We meet at our quotas and didn’t feel like we were rushing at the end to get a finished product out, that doesn’t mean everything was done in the game that we wanted to do. An example of this was the music. Three tracks were made for this game and we wanted to implement them into the main menu, game, and end party scene, but time ran out quite fast and we were only able to code one of the tracks in and it’s on a loop throughout the whole game. This doesn’t change the game, but as designers, you have a vision of what you want your game to be and by not having the tracks in there disappoints me due to the fact the work that went into there making them.

Unexperienced

Being a group that has no game development experience hurt us in some stages of development because we were either going off what we learned in class or from YouTube, not our own experiences. A problem that we faced is doing things in the wrong order which forced us to sometimes scape some code or do it all again but in a different way. This affected our time schedule because the way it worked was we would all work on something different and at the end of the week joining everything together and if we did something wrong because we were inexperienced in the matter, it would take much longer trying to get everything to work together.

Conclusion

Ultimately am I happy this the final product? Yes. I have learned a lot throughout this experience making my very first game. Learning different skills and putting those skills into practice. I am happy to say that through this experience I now have the knowledge and feel comfortable making and developing my own game which was the main goal of this experience.